The RMT fear and fast levling has killed the value of gears and ruined crafts a bit

As the topic says, because of how fast you level in this game, crafted gears barely hold any value that are not considered glamour.
What is the point of investing in a piece of armor thats going to be useless 2 days of roulettes later?

Is this really what we want out of Final Fantasy XIV?
You can spend time doing roulettes for 2 weeks and not bother with anything and use gears worth nothing and that kills the whole meaning of having gears needed for your current levels.

The pattern hasn't change throughout the years either if we look at how Heavensward and SB turned out. A same repetitive formula.
Is it the fear of people turning to RMT to buy more expensive gears the best gears must be obtained through tokens?

I will give you an example:

I created gears for an FC member yesterday, today the gears are useless and they had to upgrade. Where is the balance to any of this? I could have just advised my FC member to continue doing roulettes this entire week and not bother with anything at all and skip having to use gears for almost 10 whole levels. If i am wrong and I don't understand something please correct me.

Don't forget PotD and HoH, enabeling people to level up to 70 with iLvl of 1. :p

well then..

It's simple. If you have Gil, you buy the crafted gear to skip wasted time into farming low level gear from a old content to get to the relevant content. Craft was always used like that. And for penta meld in some cases too.

Crafted end game dungeon gear is the only gear that you will keep for a decent amount of time outside of end game crafting gear. Crafting end game dungeon gear now is pointless as i380 is no longer needed and we are heading into Shadowbringers. Players at max level are better off going for i390 or i400 right now. As for leveling it always gets replaced fast been that way since ARR..

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Originally Posted by NanaWiloh

Crafting end game dungeon gear now is pointless as i380 is no longer needed and we are heading into Shadowbringers. Players at max level are better off going for i390 or i400 right now.

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You can upgrade the crafted i380 gear to i390.

Anything below max level is mostly useless when it comes to gear progression, but that goes for most of the game's gear. The game hands you gear on your first job, so it's mostly supposed to be reserved for alt jobs once you run out of the quests.

At max level crafted gear allows you to supplement and get around timegates (first it allows you to bypass the normal raid timegate, and then it allows you to bypass the 24 man/base tome timegate on an odd patch when first implemented) so it's somewhat useful there especially if you want to gear alts or in the cutting edge raid scene that uses penta melds. The dungeon gear usually lags behind quite a bit.

Why kill the value of crafted gears though? Why most something obtained with token be better than something crafted endgame? That logic makes no sense. It makes gears very useless until you reach endgame wich it shouldnt be. The same with the fast levling it kills everything that requires the gears needed.

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Originally Posted by SkizzleAbernath

Why kill the value of crafted gears though? Why most something obtained with token be better than something crafted endgame? That logic makes no sense. It makes gears very useless until you reach endgame wich it shouldnt be. The same with the fast levling it kills everything that requires the gears needed.

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On one hand, gear needs to be obtainable for players who don't have the gil for it (ie.: New Players). On another hand, character progression is an important point in an MMO and to load it entirely into crafted items from level 1 to 70 so players would need to acquire it through spending inordinate amount of gil for it would only hamper players in terms of being able to continue progressing, on top of adding a deterrent for players who are going through the game and not feeling as if the time spent is equitable to the reward received in the form of character progression.

At end game, they're decent for glamour in some cases, and in other cases they serve as expensive entry gear for Savage tiers when they first appear. If they were to remain the best through that, then there's suddenly far less incentive to even run the content they'd be designed for due to players not feeling rewarded for the time put into it. And, either way, plenty of people will buy crafted gear when a tier releases -- a tier hasn't released since Alphascape, which now has 15% Echo, and we're in a pre-expansion content lull wherein things like these sets won't be sought after or particularly cared about outside of glamour, or for alts (despite still going for 200k+ per piece on some servers).

Though, there are crafting classes that remain valuable -- Alchemist and Culinarian, for raid potions and raid food respectively, which can't be gained without either making them by oneself, or buying them off the MB by someone who made them.

It's healthier for the game to provide the option to buy crafted items at end game wherein they'll be the best you can get for a bit, and slowly outclassed by tomestone and raid gear over time to make the actual content feel rewarding to do.

It'd be silly if the level 20 stuff would be as prized as level 70 savage gear.

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Originally Posted by AxlStream

It'd be silly if the level 20 stuff would be as prized as level 70 savage gear.

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Agreed, except for maybe glamour purposes.

Crafting is very much alive though not sure why they think it is ruined. Even lower lvl stuff sells for me.

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Originally Posted by Pepsi_Plunge

You can upgrade the crafted i380 gear to i390.

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That's actually a downgrade though. Since you can't penta-meld the i390 stuff...

With penta-meld the i380 stuff can outperform the i390 stuff.

On Topic:

Crafted gear really hasn't had much use at all during leveling really.

Since, you've always been able to just purchase vendor gear for pretty much every item slot for cheaper than anyone sells crafted gear for on the MB. Which has always been serviceable for getting through content.

Not to mention, the MSQ has routinely given out HQ gear for your first job to boot.

Even self-crafting gear is basically not really enticing, since the amount of work you have to put into to craft the items (Which more or less requires omni-crafting, due to the number of cross-class material requirements as well as the plethora of different pieces of equipment i.e. Blacksmith/Carpenter/Alchemist/Goldsmith for weapons/shields, Armourer/Leatherworker/Weaver/Carpenter for armour and Goldsmith for accessories) is not particularly worth it.

Not when you can instead put that time into crafting actually relevant end-game stuff and sell it for Gil to just buy what you need from vendors.

Since really, it's just max level gear that is really worth crafting at all. Mostly only early-mid way through an expansion though, where penta-melded gear is competitive or even BiS comparatively to Raid/Tome gear. Later in an expansion, it falls off, especially due to the silly "Upgrade" feature that prevents penta-melding on the upgraded item...

It's a shame that crafting has such a limited niche of when it's actually good.

I'd personally like to see crafted gear get some love. Especially for crafters themselves.

Like, what if they could "Upgrade" their crafted gear for a fraction of the materials it'd cost to make the higher level piece of gear from scratch. So making your own gear and upgrading it into each future piece of gear becomes a worthy use of time.

If end-game crafted gear could be upgraded to keep up with at least tomestone gear with the additional meld options to boot - Perhaps using special materials only obtained through duties so you can't cheese into World First clears of content.

Even without fear of RMT, crafted gear should not be very strong.

The strongest combat gear should be earned through battle. Not depend on the size of your purse.

While I think the very best gear should still come from endgame combat, I wish that there was a mission for crafters to produce a single set of high level gear for their own personal use. I'd love the chance to make a custom fitted suit of armor, especially if there was a way to make detailed variations to the colors/emblems of each piece. I realize that Materia and Dyes work to address this, but I feel they are a little too generic for what should be an endgame activity for crafters to work towards.

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Originally Posted by Aniforani

While I think the very best gear should still come from endgame combat, I wish that there was a mission for crafters to produce a single set of high level gear for their own personal use. I'd love the chance to make a custom fitted suit of armor, especially if there was a way to make detailed variations to the colors/emblems of each piece. I realize that Materia and Dyes work to address this, but I feel they are a little too generic for what should be an endgame activity for crafters to work towards.

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That's actually a pretty nice compromise - but I don't think the original poster would like it, since it wouldn't be able to be sold to others.

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Originally Posted by SkizzleAbernath

Why kill the value of crafted gears though? Why most something obtained with token be better than something crafted endgame? That logic makes no sense. It makes gears very useless until you reach endgame wich it shouldnt be. The same with the fast levling it kills everything that requires the gears needed.

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I think crafted raid gear is about gaining an advantage sooner. Those who have crafted gear at the start of a tier end up having far more stats than those who rely on drops, raid tokens and tomestones. If you have enough crafted pieces on you can have stats at the start of the tier that others won't get for at least several weeks. Crafted gear is also handy for people who change main in the middle of the raid tier or enter raiding a bit late. On top of that having access to crafted gear lets you min-max your stats far more because you have the choice of extra pieces of gear and pentamelds.

The value of crafted raid gear only diminishes at the end of the tier because at that point players have had the time to accumulate gear from drops, tokens and tomestones.

I don't see anything wrong with this. It's not as if tier-based gear is the only thing crafters can make. They can craft other things that continue to sell regardless of what stage of the tier it is.

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Originally Posted by Aniforani

While I think the very best gear should still come from endgame combat, I wish that there was a mission for crafters to produce a single set of high level gear for their own personal use. I'd love the chance to make a custom fitted suit of armor, especially if there was a way to make detailed variations to the colors/emblems of each piece. I realize that Materia and Dyes work to address this, but I feel they are a little too generic for what should be an endgame activity for crafters to work towards.

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I don't think the gear system allows for the customisation you're envisaging, but functional high-strength crafted armour could work, particularly if they made some of the ingredients untradeable. A multi-step process perhaps.

It would probably need to be quite difficult and/or time-consuming to be considered equatable to the difficulty of obtaining other gear.

Rowena is the biggest undercutter in the game. Beat her and call me impressed.

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Originally Posted by SkizzleAbernath

Why kill the value of crafted gears though? Why most something obtained with token be better than something crafted endgame? That logic makes no sense. It makes gears very useless until you reach endgame wich it shouldnt be. The same with the fast levling it kills everything that requires the gears needed.

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Unless you go into Savage raiding, technically the current endgame crafted gear is more than enough for you. However, the strongest gear should always be gear obtained through battle. Personally, I'd prefer Savage gear to be "the best" gear obtainable, but the developers have Tomestone gear designed for everyone to be able to achieve.

That being said, BiS sets do sometimes utilize crafted right side gear because if the ability to shove materia into it for substat gains.


As for leveling gear, you are able to level every job on the same account. For roles like tanks, healers, or casters where the gear will be shared amongst 3 different jobs, the gear serves its purpose. If you choose to only level one job, it will last for a significantly less amount of time because said job will outpace the gear with MSQ experience alone.

There is nothing wrong with the way crafted leveling gear works. You do a new dungeon every two levels, hence every two levels a new set of gear becomes available. It only makes sense. A couple of things to also consider is the HQ versions of this gear essentially make you over geared for the dungeon of their respective level. So if you want, you could take that gear into the next dungeon and you're going to be just fine. You will notice the HQ version of the current gear has very similar stats to the NQ of the next tier. Then there is the option to meld materia to it to make it even stronger. The time you spend on this is not mandatory and entirely up to you, the player.

The second thing to consider is what Hyomin spoke of with multiple jobs. Due to limited inventory, the game pretty much encourages you to level all jobs within a respective role so you do not have to hold on to that gear, or otherwise go through the trouble of obtaining it again if/when you decide to level the other jobs within a role. In this case, the gear becomes much more valuable as you will be spending a lot more time in it opposed to just focusing on one job.

I honestly can't fathom why you do not see value here, and can only surmise that you are the type of player pining for horizontal progression in this game. As an omni crafter, when I would craft my own leveling gear, I would always gather enough materials to make two sets of everything. One for me, and one for the MB. I have never had trouble selling this gear, and find the market on these items to be quite competitive. I've made a lot of gil through this practice, and due to the fact that it is leveling gear, it's value is sustained not only during a current expansion, but also into the release of other expansions as well. The same cannot be said for end game crafted gear. Crafted leveling gear may not sell for nearly as much while end game crafted gear is relevant, but at least it's steady meaning you can make much more over the course of time.

Lastly, omni crafting has far more value than just making gear, weapons, and tools: Food, medicines, furnishings, orchestrion scrolls, minions, etc. are also all great markets to get into. The power of crafting is ridiculous. While I am sure looking at 8-9 figures is nice, the true amount of gil you need in this game is only that more of it comes in than what goes out. Fattening is a universal process.